Specification:

Relevant to Blender v2.31

Texture/Material Interaction

Blender is somewhat different from most 3D packages in the logical separation between textures and materials. In Blender textures are objects that return certain values, signal generators in fact. Materials control the mapping of textures onto objects, what is affected, how much, in what way, etc. Properly designed plugins should only include variables to affect the signal returned not the mapping of it. Buttons to control scale, range, axis, etc. are best only included when they make the texture easier to use (in the case of the size button in the Tiles plugin) or they speed up the calculation (the Intensity/Color/Bump subtypes in the Clouds2 plugin). Otherwise the Material Buttons make these buttons redundant, and the interface becomes needlessly complex.